Remember the problems that plagued the N64? Lack of a disc based format and difficult console to develop for. Nintendo tried to fix this with the Gamecube and tried to be cool. “We can match anything our friends over at Sony can do” I was skeptical when I heard that line from Nintendo, but they were right. The Gamecube proved to be a far more capable machine than the PS2. What was achieved? Not much. Nintendo went with a cheaper more efficient disc based format, and even then people looked down on them. While they fixed the problems with the N64, and believe me they fixed quite a bit, they also created many mistakes with the GCN.

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After E3 many people, including myself, said it looked like the PS3’s graphics would be better than the Xbox 360. Well, ATi claims that the 360 will out perform the PS3 because Nvidia’s RSX chip is lacking the unified shader architecture that the Xenon chip has. If this is the truth than Microsoft made a good deal switching to ATi for their next-gen. Read more for a more technical breakdown.

“It’s way better than I would have expected at this point in the history of 3D graphics,” said Huddy of the Xbox 360 hardware. “The unified shader architecture alone is capable of giving a performance increase of a factor of nearly two over the hardware that we have in PCs today. That’s because we see many cases, and this is particularly true on consoles, where games are limited by one of the two groups of engines in the graphics chip, either the vertex engines or the pixel engines. With a unified pipeline we can now devote 100% of the hardware to which ever task is the bottleneck.”

Electronic boards in the classrooms are becoming more popular now. Using fingers as a stylus, teachers and students are able to share assignments, surf the web, and view video all where chalkboards used to rule. Most classrooms today use a whiteboard and a projection screen for any of the fun computer stuff. Are these new boards really a great thing? In my experience, many professors prefer to ditch the projector in favor of the whiteboard since it allows them to write and draw their thoughts faster.

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Rumors, gotta love ‘em. Here’s another one for you. Seems that there have been talks between Skype and Yahoo - perhaps to merge IM clients? Skype would definitely be a great acquisition for Yahoo, however their close friend, Bell, might not like this idea. We’ll have to keep an eye out for this one.

I feel a high sense of Star Trek-like nostalgia looking at this new product. The cards are capable of holding 30GB, and cost only $1. If the reader goes down in price, I can see this product hitting mass appeal in no time. Optware Corporation has also designed a holographic disc that holds a terabayte and is the same size as a DVD (or CD).

Heat is a computer’s sworn enemy. We have all battled against this element, trying to pump out every last frame out of our PC’s for an eternity. Now, this case modder took his fight a little too far. While most of us have about two, four, maybe six case fans, his case is comprised entirely of 80 cm fans. In theory, you would think this design would freeze your CPU, however, the difference is not much. That leaves us asking - what’s the point? Check out the pictures and guide on his personal web page.

Third party accessories for any product are mostly, by default, pretty bad in my opinion. Usually it feels like companies are trying to piggyback on the success of the popularity of the products that manufacturers work hard to come up with and market. That being said, Nyko has recently brought the iTop to the table. The draw here is that you can relocate the iPod’s functions to the top of the unit so that you don’t need to take it out of your pocket to access the click wheel. How does it work? Check out the full review after the jump.

Getting a high ranking for your site in Google requires good, frequently updated content and good inbound links. The content part is fairly straight forward, but how do you get other sites to link to you? Well, you can cross your fingers and hope that other sites find your content good enough to link to or put together a more proactive strategy.

The problem with a new site is that it often takes a long time before it is indexed by the search engines. This means you are missing out on getting traffic and making sales. Google places new sites in the “sandbox” which means they are on “hold” for a period of time before they rank.

Does Microsoft even know what they are up against? It’s as if they still consider Apple to be a “garage based” company in some kid’s basement. iTunes isn’t exactly some garage-based idea. It’s a big chunk of the legal music download industry. Is the Goliath of the software industry taking the wrong approach?

Microsoft is planning to bolster its own online song store with a new subscription service later this year as well as is “considering a more direct attack on Apple, seeking rights from copyright holders to give subscribers a Microsoft-formatted version of any song purchased from iTunes so they can be played on devices other than an iPod…